


Big Girls Don't Cry

by angelica_church_schuyler



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Gen, it's american graffiti meets heathers, jesus i must've subconsciously really hated my classmates huh, sisterly bonding through ruining your classmates' hopes and dreams, the 50s plus high school drama plus escalating levels of life ruining and violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-10-31 21:23:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17857181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelica_church_schuyler/pseuds/angelica_church_schuyler
Summary: Lucille Jenkins has always longed to win the coveted title of Prom Queen. Now that she’s finally a senior, she’s willing to do absolutely anything to get it, up to (and possibly including) murder.





	1. Lucy and Ethel

**Author's Note:**

> Hello fellow AD fans. It's time for a crazy story about Lucille's teenage years that might be classed as an AU but there's no canon evidence that this didn't happen. This chapter will just be a small introductory chapter. A warning, this will include period-typical misogyny and attempted murder. I hope you like it!

Lucille wasn’t stupid.   
She knew what the world was like for girls, especially for girls like her. She was smart. She had straight As in everything, and when her school introduced Advanced Placement classes she was one of the first to be placed in them. She was extremely capable. She should’ve been able to do anything she wanted.  
But she was a just a girl. The world cared about her looks, her home-making ability, and her fertility, nothing more. If she ever wanted the adoration and the power that she craved, that she _deserved,_ there was only one thing for her to be.

Prom Queen.

And First Lady, but she'd focus on that later. 

Since the day she’d entered middle school, she’d been planning this. She’d designed the posters, written her acceptance speech, and scrimped and saved to buy the perfect deep red dress.   
Now, with only a month and a half until Prom, all she had left to do was eliminate the competition.

* * *

Lucille strutted into school, her little sister Ethel trailing a few steps behind her, passing underneath the huge banner reading PROM 1959: A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. It was the most cliched Prom theme ever, and if it weren’t to be Lucille’s night of triumph she might not turn up out of protest.

Behind her, Ethel groaned. “I wish freshmen were allowed at Prom. I’d sure love to see your big night, Lucy.”  
“Ethel! It’s _Lucille.”_  
Despite their shared DNA, the two sisters were polar opposites. A shy girl of 15, Ethel represented the sugar and the “everything nice” that little girls were made of. Lucille, on the other hand, was the spice, with some added salt, and just a pinch of arsenic.  
Lucy and Ethel. What a pair they were.

“Right, sorry,” Ethel sighed, pushing up her glasses and giggling slightly. “Anyway, _Lucille,_ I wanna go to Prom so bad. Do you think I could get in on account of being the Prom Queen’s little sister?” She giggled again. She had a penchant for giggling. The constant laughter coming from her was often the only way most people could only tell she was there. The poor thing didn’t actually command attention.

 

“Wait…” Lucille turned to face her sister, stopping them both in our tracks. “What if I could?”  
Ethel lit up. “Really? You’d do that for me?”  
“Of course, you’re my sister! And then you can do something for me.”  
“Shoulda seen that coming.”  
“Look, Ethel, you’re small, you’re quiet, people don’t notice you - “  
“Gee, thanks.”  
“I’m not done! You’d be an invaluable resource. If you help me eliminate the competition, I’ll help you get into Prom.”  
Ethel straightened her skirt, a nervous tic that meant she was thinking hard.   
“What do you mean “eliminate”?”  
“Well, you know...incapacitate. Just make sure I win.”  
Ethel thought for a few more seconds. “How?”  
“Nothing too bad.” Depending on your moral compass.  
“Fine,” she sighed. “But! You have to do one more thing for me.”  
Lucille rolled her eyes. “Ugh, fine. What do you want? You want me to iron your clothes or clean your room or something? Because I won’t do that.”  
“No. There’s...well, there’s this boy…”  
“Ethel! We’ve been over this, honey, boys are unnecessary, stupid distractions.”  
“Not this one! He’s sweet and he’s smart and I really, really like him but whenever we’re even in the same room together I just freeze! I just want you to help me talk to him.”

Lucille looked her sister up and down. She was really quite pretty, even with her glasses, and she had good dress sense. If it weren’t for her crippling shyness, she would be quite popular. She could probably go with any number of boys. It shouldn’t be too hard to get this particular idiot’s attention.  
“Alright, fine, I’ll help you.”  
Ethel bounced up and down with glee. “Yay! Oh, thank you, you’re the best sister ever!”  
“I know, now stop bouncing. You’re not helping yourself.”  
“Right, sorry.”  
“Okay, so, you will help me carry out my plans, and I will help you talk to the boy. Fair?”  
“Fair! Sister pinky swear?”  
“Sister pinky swear,” Lucille sighed as the two linked their pinkies together.

This was going to be the weirdest sisterly bonding activity of all time.


	2. Adelaide White

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> METHOD OF ANNIHILATION: WORDS AND ESPIONAGE

ADELAIDE WHITE  
LEVEL: EASY  
POPULARITY: MEDIUM  
PRETTY? ENOUGH  
STYLISH? FOR 1952  
METHOD OF ANNIHILATION: WORDS AND ESPIONAGE

* * *

“Here’s our game plan,” Lucille announced, pointing at the chalkboard she’d set up in her and her sister’s shared room. Ethel was perched on her bed, pen and paper in hand. “We start with the easiest candidates to ruin, and escalate to the hardest.”  
“Ruin?”  
“Ruin in an exaggerated sense of the word. We start with Adelaide White.”  
“Oh, she seems nice. I like her.”  
“She has no chance of winning.”  
“Oh.”  
“She’ll be easiest.” Lucille smacked her ruler against the chalkboard. “As you see here, Adelaide is neither popular nor unpopular. She exists with her little group of friends, and that's basically all. All I need to take her down is a few choice words."  
“Right. I assume you’ll be administering the choice words.”  
“Exactly. BUT I need you to help me figure out how. Follow her and her friends around for a day. Scope out their dynamic, how they talk to each other, what they talk about, what are her weaknesses, her insecurities, et cetera, et cetera.”  
The only sound was Ethel’s pen scratching across her paper, her tongue sticking out slightly.  
“Alright...So I follow her around, listen to her conversations, gather intel...oooh, maybe she’s a Commie!”  
“I doubt she’s a Commie.”  
“Well, we could tell people she is.”  
Lucille smiled at her little sister. “I like the way you think. But I doubt we’ll have to go that far.”  
“You’re right. God only knows what would happen to her if people thought it was true. She’d probably be arrested or something.”

Lucille hummed in agreement. She briefly wondered whether her bright red prom dress could get her accused of being a Communist, but she highly doubted it. Accusations of Communist sympathies was actually not a bad idea. Veronica Czerwonka was Polish, and Poland was communist. It’d be an easy rumour to spread. She had other plans for Veronica, but she decided to keep the Commie idea filed away in her mind, just in case. It couldn’t hurt to be prepared.  
Ethel had finished writing up her notes. “Okay, I’m done. I gotta say, Lucy, I’m pretty excited, but it’s 3’o’clock, can we watch _Bandstand_ now?”  
What a stupid question. “Of course we're gonna watch _Bandstand!_ What kind of a question is that?”

* * *

After _Bandstand,_ Lucille got to work picking out Ethel’s most boring, plain, homely outfit. The more she blended into the background, the easier it would be for her to - how had Ethel put it - “gather intel” on Adelaide. Luckily, Ethel didn’t have the same sense of style as Lucille did. Compared to her older sister, Ethel dressed like a 50 year old. Lucille’s clothes were a lot more colourful, and often sparkly and shiny. Ethel, on the other hand, actually owned brown dresses. _Brown._ Lucille wouldn’t be caught dead in something so dull. But this particular dress...light brown, long-ish, with an A-line skirt and a boat neck, was perfect for Operation Adelaide. Thank God for bad dress sense. That, paired with some quiet Mary Janes and a grey cardigan, was ideal. 

The next morning, the two sisters prepped at the school entrance.  
“Test the shoes again.”  
“Lucy, we’ve tested them on every surface imaginable. At most, you can almost hear my foot meeting the ground.”  
“Test them anyway.”  
Ethel was right, they were totally inaudible. Lucille looked her over again. The brown dress, the cardigan, the shoes, her light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. It didn’t hide the good looks that ran in their family, but it did make her less noticeable. A perfect little spy.  
“Alright, you look great.”  
“I look like Auntie Janie.”  
“Exactly, it’s perfect! Do you think you’re ready?”  
Ethel took a deep breath. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I’m just listening to people’s conversations, right? I listen in on you and Mom all the time.”  
“What?”  
“Nothing, point is I can do this.”  
Lucille smiled. “I know you can. You’ll be able to catch her after homeroom, she’s in room 15 on the second floor. She has lunch in fourth period-”  
“And she sits on the table nearest to the west-most door, yeah, I know. We’ve been over this.” Ethel placed a hand on her older sister’s shoulder. “I’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing."  
“Okay, yeah, you're right. Well...go get ‘em, tiger!”  
“Don’t call me tiger.”  
“Yeah, that was awful.”  
“I’m just gonna go.”  
“Good idea.”

* * *

Adelaide White, Ethel soon discovered, was quite boring.  
She was nice, sure, but Ethel had trailing the girl for a whole hour and she hadn’t heard anything juicy. Nothing she didn’t already know, at least. Geez Louise, how had it taken Adelaide’s friends so long to realise the Jenny Fisher and Adam Price were going together? The two basically frenched right in front of everyone at Mitch’s Diner every damn day after school. You could see them playing backseat bingo at the drive-in every weekend. These girls were - and Ethel meant no offense here - incredibly dim.  
Adelaide wore the kind of dresses that Ethel might get as hand-me-downs when Lucille didn’t want them anymore. She seemed to be the last to know about any and all gossip. She and her friends were obviously very nice, but that was basically all they had going for them.  
Of course, Ethel would never say any of this out loud. That would be rude, and Ethel was nothing if not polite. But...Lordy.

At lunch, Ethel sat at the table second-nearest the west-most door, sipping her milk and trying not to fall asleep as she listened to the group she had christened the Plain White Girls’ conversations. This one was about films. The girls seemed to be as boring in this respect as in every other one.  
“I’ve never understood why anyone even watched _Jailhouse Rock._ To be totally honest with you, I don’t even like Elvis all that much.”  
So _that_ was interesting. Susie Lewis was a _blasphemer._ What kind of person doesn’t like Elvis?  
Her friends, thank God, cried out in rage.  
Once they’d finished appropriately reprimanding Susie for her heresy, Adelaide piped up. “Well, I went to _Some Like It Hot_ when it was showing, and it was _awful._ Personally - “  
“Ooh, you know what I liked?” interrupted Alice Spector. _“Anatomy Of A Murder.”_  
The other girls chimed in to agree with Alice, Adelaide fell silent and leant back on her chair slightly. She was accustomed, Ethel had learned, to being interrupted by her friends.

And surely, Ethel realised, that could be used against her.

* * *

The conspirators assembled that afternoon at their headquarters, otherwise known as the booth closest to the door at Mitch’s Diner.  
“So,” Lucille began, stirring her chocolate malt with her straw. “Find out anything interesting?”  
“Depends what you consider interesting,” replied Ethel. “You know those girls only just realised Jenny Fisher and Adam Price were going steady?”  
“What? They’ve been going together for _months!”_  
“Exactly! They _just_ found out about it!”  
“Geez…”  
“I know. God, Lucy, they were _so_ boring. I _much_ prefer hanging out with you.” Ethel took a sip of her Pepsi. “But other than all that, I did find something I think you might be able to use.”  
Lucille smirked. “They’re not Reds, are they?”  
“No,” Ethel giggled. “But I noticed something when I was watching them.” She leaned in over the table. “Poor Adelaide can barely finish a sentence.”  
“Huh. That is interesting.”  
“Just...you won’t be _too_ mean to her, will you, Lucy?”  
“Lucille.”

A few days later, Lucille just happened to fall into step with Adelaide on the way to her AP Chem class. What a lovely coincidence that was. Lucille hadn't even realised Adelaide went this way to get to her Home Ec class, and she certainly wasn't going the long way around to her own classes so that she'd bump into Adelaide.  
Nope. Just a coincidence.  
“Hey, Adelaide!”  
“Oh, uh, hi Lucille…”  
Lucille tried not to enjoy the fear in the other girl’s eyes. “So, you’re running for Prom Queen too, huh?”  
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if I’ll win, but I guess I thought, you know, why not give it a go?”  
“I love that attitude! And, hey, you might win! You’re radioactive, kitten!”  
Adelaide smiled. “You really think so!”  
“Yeah! I mean…” Lucille made a show of looking around. “Look, your friends might not get it, but I think you’re great.”  
Adelaide slowed down. “What do you mean?”  
“Well, you know, I just hear things and...well, _I_ think you’re a gas. Hey, speaking of a gas, you ever go to Mitch’s Diner? That place is Fat City, I go everyday with my sister.”  
“Uh, I guess I’ll have to check it out. Um, my classroom is this way, so…”  
“Oh, okay, cool. Guess I’ll see you on Prom Night! Toodles!”  
Adelaide waved and smiled weakly as she walked away. 

She pulled out of the Prom Queen race the next day.

* * *

“But how did _that_ make her drop out?” Ethel asked, a few steps behind Lucille as they walked home from the diner.  
Lucille rolled her eyes. “She thinks I’ve heard that her friends don’t like her, she doubts it at first but then she remembers how often they cut her off and don’t listen to her, then she starts to doubt how much everyone _else_ likes her, making her sure she won’t win Prom Queen, and thus she drops out of the race completely.”  
“Oh...so she just thinks her friends hate her?”  
“No, of course not. She thinks they don’t like her.”  
“Right, ‘cause that’s so much better.”  
“Oh, cut the gas, okay, it’s fine.”

Back in their room, Ethel watched as Lucille wiped away their information on Adelaide and scrawled a new name at the top in big block letters.

MARIA RICCI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lowkey i felt guilty writing lucille's conversation with adelaide. that was mean. i'm no stranger to second hand embarassment but never before have i felt second hand guilt.  
> i also discovered a 1950s slang diary before this chapter so prepare for all of the cheesy and amazing 50s slang i can manage to shoe-horn in here.  
> anyway, i've never uploaded two chapters of a fic on the same day before so this is an exciting first for me lol. i hope you liked it xx


	3. Maria Ricci

**MARIA RICCI**  
**LEVEL: MEDIUM**  
**POPULARITY: ABOVE AVERAGE**  
**PRETTY? VERY**  
**STYLISH? VERY**  
**METHOD OF ANNIHILATION: THE RUMOUR MILL**

* * *

Ethel stumbled through the cafeteria, on the lookout for Adam. Lucy had insisted that she “dive into the deep end” and seek him out and talk to him. That was easy for her, Ethel thought, she was confident and beautiful and very scary. Ethel was mousy and short and shy. Lucy commanded attention and respect everywhere she went. Ethel tended to blend into the background, which was the whole reason she’d gotten roped into her sister’s scam in the first place.

This time, however, Lucy was the one observing. She was in the cafeteria somewhere, also looking for Adam, so that she could observe how Ethel acted around him. This was apparently supposed to help her figure out where Ethel needed help and how to help her. Ethel thought it was an awful idea, but she went along with it anyway, just like she went along with everything her sister said. She figured Lucy knew what she was doing, she was very smart.

It was during Ethel’s musings about her older sister that she collided with another student wandering the cafeteria, spilling both of their trays everywhere and knocking the other kid to the ground.

“Oh my god! Oh no, I’m so sorry!”  
Dropping to the ground, Ethel started to pick up the food flung everywhere. Still babbling out apologies, she finally caught sight of the boy she’d knocked over and froze.

Of course. Of _course!_ It was so damn typical of her to finally find the boy she liked by _throwing him to the ground_ and _covering him with milk!_  
The two of them stared at each other, both still crouched on the ground.  
“Hi,” he said, his fingers moving towards his head, where Ethel now saw a red mark beginning to form.  
“Uhhh...hey,” she replied. She tore her eyes away from Adam and kept tending to the mess on the ground. He was looking around on the floor for something.  
“Can you see my specs?”  
“Huh?”  
“My glasses, they fell off, I-I can’t see them. Sorry, my eyesight’s really bad, I can barely see anything right now, I can’t even see you...not that I’m, you know, _looking_ at you in a...way…”

Good God, thought Ethel. There was only one reason he’d be rambling like that…

She’d given him a concussion! He’d _never_ go to Prom with her now!

Finally, after what felt like hours, she found his glasses and handed them back to him, standing up again as she did so. He pulled himself back to his feet, attempting to clean his glasses on his shirt.  
Oh, God, what was she supposed to do? Should she say something? Should we apologise again? Maybe she should just kiss him right then and there - what? No, what on earth was she thinking?  
Adam replaced his glasses and looked up at her, a small, nervous smile on his face. He opened his mouth and -  
“Bye!” Ethel squeaked.

She rushed away as fast as her relatively short legs could carry her. She finally spotted Lucille, head in hands, on the other side of the cafeteria.

“Oh my God,” her sister said.  
“I know,” Ethel groaned.  
“Oh my _God.”  
“I know!”_

They really had their work cut out for them.

 

“The Rumour Mill is the most powerful weapon known to teenage girls,” Lucille explained, pacing the room with ruler in hand. “It is the atom bomb of high school. Any old rumour could damage Maria Ricci, sure, but we need to find out what will _really_ hurt her. Or rather, hurt her Prom Queen campaign.”  
“And that’s where I come in?”  
“And that’s where you come in.” Ethel was really starting to get the hang of this whole thing. She wasn’t taking as many notes, which Lucille did not think was a good sign, but she seemed more attentive, and she had been willing and able to help take Adelaide down. Her confidence was badly shaken after today’s cafeteria disaster, but Lucille hoped that Operation Destroy Maria would help at least a little bit. “It’ll be basically the same thing, maybe a little easier. I have some ideas, but I need you to help me narrow down which rumour will destroy her life.”  
Lucille began to writing said ideas on their board as Ethel mulled over her sister’s choice of words.  
“You mean destroy her...chances of winning?”  
“That’s what I said. So I need to figure out which of these rumours -” she gestured to the board “- will work best.”

The ideas were all....well, Ethel would call them _interesting_. Lucille preferred the term _genius_.

COMMUNIST  
PREGNANT  
UNDERCOVER CIA AGENT  
UNDERCOVER KGB AGENT  
HOMOSEXUAL  
DEAD/DYING  
PLANNING TO ASSASSINATE THE PRESIDENT  
CANCER?  
DYES HER HAIR

“So,” Lucille turned back around, her long hair swinging behind her. She was growing it out for Prom. “First thoughts: which do you think is best?”  
Ethel considered it for a second.  
“I think Commie is always funny.”

* * *

Ethel felt a strange sense of comfort slipping back into her sleuthing outfit. It was almost exactly the same as last time, except she was wearing her shades instead of her regular glasses, as well as a plain brown headscarf. This time she was undercover not at school, but at the park near St Michael’s Church, waiting for Maria and her friends to come and sit under the trees to complain about the awful taste of Communion wafers as they did every Sunday.  
Hopefully, amidst the talk of bodies and blood, she would also reveal something that would inadvertently end her Prom hopes and dreams.  
Gosh, what a mean sounding sentence. Even just thinking it made Ethel feel more like Lucille.  
Behind her park bench, Ethel could hear the sound of heels clacking on the church’s stone stairs and young girls saying goodbye to their parents and promising to be home before dinner. She adjusted her glasses and headscarf, hopefully covering her face as much as she could and avoiding being recognised.  
“Ugh,” a voice Ethel recognised as belonging to Maria groaned as she sat on the roots of an old oak tree. “Sometimes I think my parents are trying to kill me…”

Ethel smiled softly. This outta be good.

* * *

That evening Mitch’s Diner was full of the same students, dropouts, and greasers as always. Ethel struggled to open her Pepsi while she explained the day’s findings to Lucille.

“I found out a lot we could use against her if we were talking to her parents or something,” she began. “Apparently they’re real strict. Pretty religious, you know. They don’t even like her wearing makeup, she’s gotta change and do her hair and put her makeup on in the school bathrooms every morning. And did you hear she’s going with Daniel Weissman? He’s Jewish, she's Catholic, they would freak if they knew. And one of her friends said somethin’ about seeing the two of them...you know...playing...backseat bingo at the Passion Pit.”  
“Fucking in his car at the drive-in, yeah, I heard about that.”  
_“Lucy!”_  
“What, it’s not like Mom can hear us!”  
“Still...we’re in _public._ And girls shouldn’t talk like that.”  
“Don’t flip your wig out. So all you found out was common knowledge?”  
“No! I got other stuff too.”  
“Let’s hear it.”

Ethel leaned back as far as she could in her booth. “First,” she said. “I want you to tell me how you’re gonna make Adam fall in love with me, especially after that disaster last week.”  
Lucille rolled her eyes. She’d taken the liberty of checking up on this Adam boy instead of going to her English class that morning (she’d already passed everything, she really had no need to be in class anymore). If she’d found the right Adam, and she was fairly sure she had, he was everything she expected. Skinny, blond, glasses, only a few inches taller than Ethel. A real candy ass. He hadn’t seemed very...well, overtly masculine, and that was always a good sign. But he did seem somewhat attainable, even to a girl who froze up at the sight of him.

“I think you just need to build up your confidence.”  
“That’s not real advice. I coulda gone to anyone for that!”  
“Ugh, alright. Here’s what you do: Next time you see him, you think to yourself “I am Ethel Ava Jenkins. I am pretty, I am smart, and he would be lucky to have me.” And then you go talk to him.”  
Ethel still didn’t look convinced. “That seems too easy.”  
“It is.” Lucille shrugged. “Boys are easy. Now…” She leaned forward, resting her arms on the table. “What else have you got?”

Ethel mirrored her sister’s stance. “Well, you remember I mentioned Danny Weisman and the whole...backseat bingo thing. I thought maybe that part hadn’t gotten out yet, and that if it did I though it would totally lose her the Catholic vote, which is her main demographic, but I guess if people already know then that’s useless too.”

Her main demographic. Lucille had never considered _demographics._ God, that was...that was pretty smart. “Well, yeah, obviously I thought of that too. Maybe you can go back tomorrow and see if you can find anything else.”  
“Yeah, maybe...she also said she’s leaving school for a little while, just after the prom. I think she said she was going to Italy, but…”  
“The rest of the school doesn’t know that, well, except for her friends. She could be anywhere…”  
Ethel nodded. She’d finally managed to get her Pepsi open. “We could smash all that information together somehow, know what I mean? A rumour that involves Danny Weisman and her random absence, that would lose her the Catholic vote...and the Italian vote, but that chart’s basically a Venn Diagram.”  
Lucille gasped. “I’ve got it! Oh my God, it’s genius. Oh, how did it take me so long, Lucy, you idiot! Ethel, by the end of next week the whole goddamn school is gonna be convinced that Maria Ricci is-”  
“A Commie!”  
“...No, Ethel. That she’s pregnant. You took all of the drama out of that. God, that was so anticlimactic.”  
“I just really want someone to be a Commie.”

* * *

First Ethel got the news out to the freshmen. It was simple, really, even for a novice gossip like her. She’d start or infiltrate a conversation about Prom, making sure to mention Maria Ricci. Inevitably, someone else would bring up Danny Weissman, giggling as freshmen were wont to do, and Ethel would make a comment about how she heard from her sister…  
“...that Maria’s leaving school after Prom.”  
“Why? Where is she going?”  
“I don’t know, but Maria told my sister not to say anything. I don’t know for sure, but it sounds like she could be...you know…”  
The other girls would inevitably lower their voices to a whisper. _“No!”_  
“Well, like I said, I don’t know. She does like a little...well, _bigger._ All I know for sure is that if she is, her parents are gonna flip their lids. They’re really religious.”

As Lucille had pointed out (using Ethel as an example) freshmen couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Naturally, they would tell their friends, their cousins, their older siblings, who would tell _their_ friends and cousins and older siblings, and so on and so forth until the whole school was buzzing about a girl who would never be queen.

 

Ethel managed to catch up to Lucille at her locker between classes a few days into the Maria Affair.  
“Hey, kitten,” Lucy said, not looking at her sister in favour of eyeballing the students rushing by them. “Everyone’s talking. I think Operation Madonna was a success.”  
Ethel laughed a little at the nickname. It was probably the best one they'd come up with so far. “Yeah, looks like it. Hey, have you seen Adelaide lately?”  
“Who?”  
“Adelaide? White? The last girl I stalked for you?”  
“Her? No, I haven’t seen her. Why?”  
“Oh...she hasn’t been around for a while…”  
“Well, ain’t that a bite. What does it have to do with me?”  
“Well…” Ethel paused, unsure how to phrase her thoughts. “Well, what if...I mean...do you think she’s okay? You weren’t _too_ mean to her, were you?”  
“Of course not! Look, who cares? She’s probably just sick. And she was kind of a germ anyway.”  
Lucille abruptly turned on her high heels, waltzing off to class without so much as a goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another chapter done, another teenage girl's life destroyed, another one bites the dust, etc.  
> this was very fun!! i feel like it was super dialogue heavy but oh well what are you gonna do when the only thing you're good at writing is dialogue  
> looking at it now this is a lot shorter than i thought it was but oh well c'est la vie ig  
> anyway, i hope you liked this chapter!! i personally did, and i'm really excited for everything in store for lucille and ethel!!  
> thanks for reading and commenting, it really means a lot xx


End file.
